Scrums effect on our development
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Working with scrum as our framework has aided us with scheduling our workload efficiently, for the most part. I cannot speak for everyone, but at least in my group we feel like the milestones set by by our course representative are diminishing the freedom that scrum is supposed to give the team. I can understand that it is easier to judge how far a project has progressed if they pass all the set criterias, but it feels like it makes the project take the form of a waterfall more than anything else. What I considered a core feature in our game, the Bride, had to be pushed farther into development because we felt the need to complete all of the criterias we had for the alpha, which stinged a little bit since we could not test said feature during our alpha playtest. On a more positive note, the scrum framework has given more structure and has lessened confusion when it comes to planning and execution of plans. Which features gets worked on when and to an extent, how, is mostly clear due to having sprint planning/retrospective/reflection meetings, where confusion gets cleared up through conversation. Keeping track of what is being worked on this day and what has been worked on the previous day is made easy through daily stand-up meetings. So far we have been able to meet face-to-face for the daily stand-up meetings, only missing a planned stand-up once. Having these meetings regularly has, in my opinion, been improving our team’s synergy, since we are forced to spend time together, we get to know each other better, both personally and professionally. It has helped with understanding what everyone is capable of, but also what they are willing to do. This what scrum is meant to do, encourage conversation, so I would suppose it is doing its job pretty well at this stage. The beginning of the project however was not exactly the most fruitful weeks of work, considering I was the only one who actually knew what we had to do and how we would do it, I was surprised that the project managers we lead blindly in to this course, but that is all behind us and I have heard that it has been looked at by the department so hopefully the next years students can take more advantage of scrum than we could.  |